Page 3 of College Boy

Emma glanced down as if forgetting she’d worn them out of the house. “Shit,” she huffed, lifting one graceful leg as if to examine it more closely. “I was halfway out the door to yell at you guys when I felt the wet grass under my bare feet and went back in and these were the closest to the door for some reason and...” Emma paused, mid-rant, peering up at him with a curious expression. “Remind me why I’m telling you all this again?”

Mitch sagged against a nearby stairwell, beaming his best shit-eating grin and nodding. “I just have one of those faces, I suppose. People just want to tell me things.”

Emma seemed to size him up, but she wasn’t the only one. As they savored their brief standoff, Mitch took in more details of his surprising late-night guest—the full lips, even bare of lipstick still ripe and rouged. The pert breasts, small beneath the thin jacket, the long, tapered waist and even longer legs, even if they did descend all the way into those puffy, fuzzy slippers.

“Well, right now I wantyouto tellmesomething, Mitch,” Emma huffed, inching closer as his cocky façade crumbled with each pointy finger and flared nostril. “Why are you so protective of those damn stairs, huh, Pretty Boy?”

Mitch stammered, but not for the reason Emma might have thought. In all his days, no one had ever called him “Pretty Boy” before. Nerd? Sure. Dorkus Breath? Plenty of times. String Bean? More than he’d care to count. But Pretty Boy? Not on your life.

“I’m not being protective,” he insisted, he hoped convincingly. “I just, I’m sorry about the noise. Earlier, I mean? And the fireworks, and the skinny-dipping and ... well, all of it, really. But party’s over, right? So...”

He was tempted to scoot his hands along, like a waving motion to send her on her way, but didn’t think it would go over very well with Reggie’s nosy neighbor.

Emma nodded, nostrils flaring less often than they had, say, 90 seconds earlier. “The party may be over,” she insisted all the same, “but my job’s not.”

“Job?”

“You think I came over here for fun?” Emma huffed. “No, sir, I most certainly did not. I came over here to give Reggie a firm talking to and to make sure you kids hadn’t burned the damn house down. It’s the least I could do, as a good neighbor.”

“Well, it’s still standing, so...” Mitch hemmed, glancing around the living room in all its drunken debauchery. “Good neighbor status still intact?”

“It will be,” Emma insisted, inching closer and putting one pink fuzzy slipper on the bottom step beside where he stood. “When I see Reggie for myself and give him a mouthful.”

Mitch snorted, turning to follow her up the steps and, even with his long, cricket legs, finding them no match for Emma’s blistering pace and righteous, good neighborly zeal. “Oh, he’s got a mouthful all right.”

Emma turned at the landing halfway up the stairs. “Beg pardon?”

“Nothing,” Mitch lied. “It’s just, you might want to lecture him in the morning when he’s, you know ... alone?”

Emma had sprinted to the top of the stairs, Mitch hot on her heels and not sure why. After all, Reggie was just his ticket to a scenic South Carolina beach town. Hardly someone he was close to, let alone needed to protect. Still, the kid had given him a ride all the way to Flamingo Shores, the least he could do was shield him from the crazy sexpot cougar next door, right?

“I already know he’s not alone,” Emma insisted, facing a hallway full of doors in the spacious McMansion her little Reggie from next door called home. “He brought half of Coastal College home with him for spring break, apparently.”

Chapter Three

Emma

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